


Fold and Freeze

by ssstrychnine



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, ballet is cooler than everything, red room nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:18:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2586209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natalia Romanova dances in the ballet, the Black Widow kills men, Natasha Romanoff saves them. She is three girls and she is one, she lives three lifetimes and she lives one, she lives them with the Winter Soldier and without him. A Natasha-centric decade-spanning story about reconciling these lives and figuring out who she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Natasha finds him first. There are many interested parties and a million million people looking (for love, for hate, for power), but she finds him first in a grimy, dim-lit apartment on the bad side of town. It had been a safe-house, she knows this like she had guessed he would. A safe-house for sleeper agents, for drops, for _tidying up_. Some place that she’d thought might conceivably still be there, forgotten, not a safe-house anymore, just a point of reference, a pin in paper, a spark on the line.

He is sat in the corner of the bedroom, the dimmest part, between the bed and the wall, taut as a drawn string, a child waiting to be punished. When he sees her he is on his feet in all the time it takes to blink and his fists are clenched and he’s holding a knife and the dirty light glances off the dirty metal of his left hand. He looks like he’s been spat out of a nightmare, which isn't that far from the truth. She almost calls him comrade. 

“You never told me you were American,” she says instead. 

“You never told me _you_ were American,” he whispers. 

“I’m not,” she walks forward, his fists raise higher, she stops. 

“Neither am I,” he says, and he must know she’s good enough to hear the question there. 

“You saved Steve’s life.” 

“He...prevented me from dying,” the Winter Soldier doesn't have words like save in his vocabulary (in his brain, in his _programming_ ). “And then I did the same for him.” 

“You failed your mission,” Natasha says bluntly and he looks at her, hollow and cold. 

“Yes,” he agrees quietly. 

“He’s a good man, I’m glad.” 

“I remember a girl who would not have cared for the good in men.” 

“You remember death in the shape of a girl,” she says, she shivers. 

“A soldier,” he smiles like he’s seen the end of the world, like he’s made it happen. 

“You might talk to him, to Steve,” she suggests gently. She takes a seat on the edge of the bed. 

“I don’t _know_ him,” the Winter Soldier hisses, suddenly animated, a wounded sound through bloody teeth. “I am not the person he remembers, I am not...a _person_." 

He slumps against the wall again, slips down, looks so human as he declares himself not to be. With his metal arm and his face raw and open without the mask, without the paint, without everything they did to him to make him a machine. (Everything he did to _himself_ , Natasha doubts Hydra would have taken the time to line his eyes in black). He is not the Winter Soldier she had known, the cold assassin of a cold war, the warm body, the hot mouth. He is that man stripped of everything and built up new and stripped down again and again and again. Bleached and splintered wood after too much paint thinner. A cloth wrung out beyond use. She wants to warm his hands in hers, she wants to tell him he doesn't have to remember. 

“I’m surprised that you remember me,” she says instead. 

“Hydra doesn't care about you,” he shrugs. “You are just a traitor. I would have killed you after this, if I didn't kill you during.” 

“You tried,” she sniffs. “You’re getting sloppy in your old age.” _This is not the first time you've tried, Hydra must care some._

“I could say the same about you. You never used to have such gallant heroes to save you,” he shoots back. She wants to hug him, she wants to put everything she can into a smile and a touch, but she doesn't. 

“No, I just had you holding me back,” she says easily. 

They fall into silence. Natasha leans back on her hands, the Winter Soldier bows his head. She thinks his hair needs washing, she thinks it’s probably been seventy years since it was. She thinks she should have told Steve. She’d been to his exhibition same as everyone, seen her teacher in blood in the face of a dead war hero. She’d broken a glass that night, champagne had stained her dress, and Clint had given some excuse about crowds when she bolted with blood at her fingertips. He hadn't asked her for the truth. He was good like that, good at not asking. The Winter Soldier was good at that too. He never questioned anything. She wonders whether if he thinks she worked for Hydra, wonders whether he knows he worked for different people. Before. 

“Hydra will be gone soon,” she tells him. 

“Cut off one head,” he grits out, looking at her with eyes lit like lampfire, a ghost behind them, a painful smile bitten back. “I am supposed to...I’m supposed to terminate myself if something goes this wrong.” 

“I know,” Natasha wonders if she ever looked like that, in the S.H.I.E.L.D interrogation room with a dislocated shoulder and two black eyes and an arrow wound in her calf. Ten years after leaving the Red Room in the dirt but not an American yet. “And here you are.” 

He toys with the knife in his hand, drags the point across the metal of his arm, nails on a chalkboard sharp. “And here I am.” 

He would be itching. His skin crawling to get back, get under, get lost. It would be easy to flush all of this away. But he must have checked the other place first, the one Natasha doesn't know, a cage for a pet, a Red Room outside of _the_ Red Room. Maybe this is a trap and he is waiting to be picked up, maybe he’s not as desperate as he looks, but Natasha doubts it. 

“You’re armed, aren't you Natalia?” he asks her and her breath catches in her throat and she knows what’s he’s asking (with a name she hasn't heard in a lifetime, a name he’d whispered against her throat, _her_ name). 

“Absolutely not,” she whispers. 

“Then why are you here?” His voice hitches higher, almost a whine, something pleading there that makes makes Natasha want to bolt. She almost does. Her hands grip the old grey duvet, she sits up straighter. She doesn't know what to say so she doesn't say anything. She looks at her feet. 

“Natalia,” he purrs from behind her, nothing cold in his voice now, nothing desperate, warm honey. “You loved me once, give me this.” 

“I did not,” she barks out automatically, not looking back. “You were a distraction, you were a warm body.” 

“Even better, this should be easy.” 

“I can help you.” 

She doesn't hear him move but she feels it and she throws herself to her feet and backwards and the air whistles as his metal fist slams passed her ear and a few locks of her hair drift to the floor as the knife in his other hand cuts the other way. She doesn't draw her gun, she grabs his right arm, she twists back, takes the knife, she kicks him in the chest and he stumbles. He is damp still, from the Potomac River. He is damaged still, from everything else, and he _stumbles_. But it doesn't stop him lunging forward again and his metal fist clips her cheekbone and her vision blurs and the pain is sick yellow bright and dead blood dull. She ducks his other fist, and his boots as he kicks out at her savagely, and his left hand again as he pushes forward. She uses the bed for height, knees him in the jaw and backs away when he falters, pressing herself against the headboard, his knife warm in her hand. 

“You’re not as good as him,” he growls. 

“I don’t want to kill you." 

“Neither did he,” he steps onto the bed, it dips with his weight and something like a smile flickers across his face. Something she can almost recognise as his. “Any other time, you and me and a bed, Natalia.” 

“Any other time,” she whispers. “Except you want me to kill you instead.” 

“Haven’t we always mixed business with pleasure?” 

She shuts her eyes. She will kill him and deal with lawyers and go on holiday. _Business and pleasure_. She will push the blade through his temple, a hot knife through butter. He is still weak from his fight with Steve, he will break with something placed well, he _wants_ to break. A blow to shatter him, she’s done that before. She doesn't want to kill him, she never has (thought she won’t say she never will, Natasha doesn't play at predictions). She doesn't want to kill him. But she will. 


	2. One

Natalia Romanova dances Swanhilde in _Coppelia_. She is a girl pretending to be a doll pretending to be a girl. A young girl, a child really, stood at the foot of a small bed in a room with many other beds and many other girls. They fight tooth and nail, bare limbs and bared teeth. Girls pretending to be weapons pretending to be girls. Natalia doesn't know how to separate pointe shoes and stiletto blades. 

The dance is supposed to be a comedy but it’s not when she dances it. She is the dead eyed doll and the vicious, trick-handed girl in embroidered flowers and hair ribbons. Swanhilde is driven by curiosity and love but Natalia is driven by her country and by the cold. 

In the Red Room they wind up the key in her back and after, when she’s stood, swaying, before them, she tells them, slurring her words, that she’d do their violence without being so compelled, and they smile. She stands by her bed with her hands behind her back and there are other girls with her. She is not fiercer than they are, she does not want to serve more, she has nothing, just as they do. But she is strong and she is capable and maybe she is more willing to _cheat_ than they are (her teeth and her hands draw blood more often than any other). But she is still a young girl among young girls. She dances. She fights. They are a line of candles tiptoeing through a dark toymakers shop and she is the only one who stays to find out what’s casting such frightening shadows and how to _beat it_. 

When she is fifteen (she thinks, she is told) a man called the Winter Soldier comes to see her dance. No, he comes to the Red Room, to the hall where they train, and he picks three dancers and she is one of them. He has a correcting rod, he improves their form, he taps it against their knees and under their thighs and across their stomachs because a dancer is all strong lines and they are still soft children. He teaches them holds and rolls and points of pressure that will make a man twice their size crumple like paper. 

They fight like they have been trained for it all of their lives, like girls with keys in their backs, and he does too. Except sometimes he slips and Natalia thinks she’s the only one who notices this. His eyes lose focus and the force behind his fight changes. He fights like he’s got a life he cares about instead of just the flesh and blood and bones of a body (instead of just the metal arm). He’s easier to beat in those moments, Natalia decides, because he’s _scared_ , and she’s able to dart behind him, drive her foot into the back of his knee, grab his arm and twist until he rolls over her hip. When he gets to his feet he’s a robot again and he blacks her eye and bruises her ribs like he never was anything else.

When there is no one watching he hurts them less and they all pretend not to notice.

He likes Yelena best. She fights him prettiest, she dances with him easiest, a pas de deux of air. Yelena should be Swanhilde, first in line and best at clockwork technique, but she’s not. Natalia doesn't deserve it, she is clumsy, she dances like she cares (though she doesn't, she _does not_ ) and she fights like she might pull the key out of her back and use it as a weapon (and she would, in an instant). But she is Swanhilde and he likes Yelena best. 

But it’s Natalia who first draws blood. It’s a messy swipe of fingernails across his cheek, not a machine born to fight, a girl with no key and no cogs and no commands, it’s desperate and it’s angry and she’s _sick_ of losing. He staggers backwards and she does too, puts her hands behind her back and holds them still, stands up straighter with her feet together like they’re glued. She thinks that the spotlight on her is brighter now, she is about to fall and the crowd will hiss in glee and in sympathy. Perhaps she will break her toes and never have to go en pointe again. 

The blood drips down his face and she watches him and he tilts his head like he’s changed his mind about something and after that she doesn't see him anymore. She doesn't see any of them anymore. She is shuffled off to dark rooms and red stained windows and she doesn't know where she is (or who, or _who_ ) only that she hears whispers in her head all the time and she hangs up her slippers for good. Little girls in Russia don’t dance, it is too cold for dancing and they must be prepared. 

In this new pace she is the only woman and the men are old and cold. They tell her to be a spider and her memories blur at the edges. She will be a spider, she will dance on her toes on spider’s silk. She will serve the motherland and she will be good at it. That’s what they tell her (and her memories blur at the edges) and she blinks and she is told she’s nineteen years old. 

 

Natalia is reborn as a ballerina (she thinks she has danced before, as a child, in some warm room with other warm girls in leotards and slippers and beds in a row). She is a ballerina and her husband Alexei is a pilot and she loves him, she loves him, she loves him. Her first lead is Swanhilde and she is young for a principal dancer but she’s given roses and a standing ovation at the end and old ladies cry at the beauty of it all. She goes home to Alexei and he is handsome and perfect and she loves him, she loves him, she loves him. He works for the KGB and the other dances whisper about how Natalia has everything and don’t they _wish_ they had just a touch of it. Natalia has a key in her back and sometimes she finds red under her fingernails and she doesn't know how it gets there and sometimes her knees have bruises but they never last long and sometimes she dreams about a man with a metal arm, but she has _everything_. 

Natalia fights off men who would hurt her. Hands at her neck in the dark of an alley and a voice, American, words in English that she shouldn't understand.

“Don’t say a word.” 

So she doesn't, but her hands form fists and her mouth a snarl and she twists and pulls and the man behind her, the American, is thrown over her hip like a sack of flour. She burns with rage and her hands move automatically. She punches the man who doesn’t fight her back, she kicks him in the ribs as he tries to get to his feet and he falls, she backs away when he stops moving, she backs away until she can turn and run. She doesn’t stop running until she in in the apartment she shares with Alexei and it is cold and dark and empty because he’s often gone and her hands are shaking. It had been easy, hurting the man, it had been easy like she’d done it a thousand times. 

“My training,” she whispers to the quiet room, because that must be it. _I am strong, my feet have bled and my muscles have screamed and I. Am. Strong_. 

That night she dreams of the man and in her dream the arm he throws around her neck is metal and he doesn't let go when she grabs him and he pulls tighter and tighter and tighter and she wakes up with a sheet wrapped around her throat and she frowns and shakes it off. She goes to the theatre. She dances. 

Later, she starts to notice a man coming to the ballet. He wears leather gloves and sharp suits and his eyes are circled dark and he is at every performance of their season of _Coppelia_. 

“Is he someone’s lover?” she asks Yelena as they watch the crowd from backstage.

“ _I_ wouldn't say no,” Yelena laughs (Yelena _lies_ , she doesn't even touch anyone if she can help it). “I haven’t seen him with any of the girls.”

“No,” Natalia agrees and she turns away sharply and the pair head back to costume. 

Natalia is dancing Swanhilde, the girl pretending to be a doll pretending to be a girl. She wears ribbons and a crown of flowers and some of the other dancers tell her that her hair makes it impossible for her to be truly graceful, like red hair is too garish, like red hair is too dangerous, like red hair ruins the line and taints the froth of lace and tulle and the blush of pointe shoes. But Natalia thinks that ballet starts with blood and that there is always danger there and if they want to tell her it’s her hair that makes her dances dangerous she isn't going to try and convince them otherwise. She is just going to dance. She is just going to be dangerous. 

The man watches them and she thinks she _knows_ him. He exists on the tip of her tongue, a name waiting to spill out, but she can’t get it and it gnaws at her. She weaves in and out of toymakers shops en pointe. He watches every dance and he claps at the right places and he stands at the end when Swanhilde and Franz bow. And then one night he waits for her. He is under dark, wreathed in mist and dim light from the guttering street lamp. She knows he is here for her like she knows Swanhilde’s entrance dance, something she’s done a thousand times.

“What do you want?” she asks him, irritated by this knowledge, itchy with a need to know more.

“Is your dancing difficult?” he asks her. He is leaning against a wall and he looks up at her through his lashes. Yelena raises an eyebrow at her and disappears into the night. 

“I...yes, of course,” she replies, but it’s not true. It is easy to dance, it feels like she was born knowing how, born in ballet slippers with broken toes. “It takes an extreme amount of dedication.” 

“Yes,” he nods, presses his lips together thoughtfully like she has told him something interesting and not obvious. “And you are dedicated?” 

“Yes,” she says, but she doesn't think that’s true either. “I've done this for a long time.” 

“Do you...do you love to dance?” he asks, the stutter in his voice jarring at the words slightly, pushing them out harshly, clattering them over his teeth. 

“Every little girl dreams of being a ballerina,” she whispers, but it’s a knee jerk reaction, it’s rehearsed words that she’s never rehearsed, it’s a practised response and actually maybe she has said it before, it’s what she always says when she’s asked, but she can’t remember _being_ that little girl. She remembers a long room with short beds, bare limbed girls stood at attention, bare limbed girls fighting tooth and nail. She had never dreamt of ballet, she had dreamt of being a weapon. She staggers back from the man, from where she has swayed toward him, and her head hurts unbearably and her mouth tastes so metallic she has to turn away to spit but the taste doesn’t leave. 

The man with the gloves is there to catch her when she faints.

_She thinks she hears voices, she thinks she hears Alexei and the man in gloves but she can’t be sure. She falls asleep in her bed with her husband beside her and she dreams that she faints and a man with a metal arm catches her._

_“Don’t say a word,” he whispers and she wakes up drenched in sweat._

Alexei comes to her next performance, Alexei who has never come to see her dance, and there is a man she doesn't recognise with him. A man with shadows under his eyes and gloves on his hands. She doesn't know why the gloves should seem unusual, everyone wears them, but they do. 

“Is your dancing difficult?” he asks her and she smiles.

“It is, but I am strong,” she tells him and he nods, unfathomable. 

At home Alexei tells her the KGB are looking for female spies. 

“You _are_ strong,” he tells her, hooking a lock of her hair behind her ear. “I think you would be good for us.” 

Natalia shivers, she glows, she accepts. 

She is trained by the man who came with Alexei to watch her dance. He keeps his shirt buttoned to the cuffs at all times and never takes off his gloves. She knows as soon as they fight for the first time that his left arm is not flesh and bone and blood and she marvels at the technology of the prosthetic, how good it must be, but she doesn’t ask him to show her. He has always worn gloves, for all the lifetimes she has known him.

“What should I call you?” she asks him, after days of not calling him anything.

“It doesn't matter,” he tells her. “It’s not important.”

So she calls him nothing and he doesn't say her name and they train.

He is merciless from the start, when she is standing with her feet turned out and her hands clasped in front of her. He trips her up with a sweep of his legs and she crashes to the floor and is back on her feet in an instant, furious and fight-ready. His face is blank, it always is, and she lunges. It’s like she’s done it a thousand times before. She knows it like she knows ballet, like she picked it up out of thin air or learned it in a previous life. She knows how to protect her hands from the impact of a punch and the softest places to hit and the parts that will hurt most and he’s better than her but she meets his blows with accuracy and with skill. 

“You are too tense,” he tells her when they are both sweat stained and panting, the palm of his left hand brushes over her shoulder blades. “You need to relax, you should not be angry with me.”

“This is new to me,” she spits at him, panting. “Give me time to learn and I won’t be angry when you cheat.”

“I thought you said you were strong.”

“I _am_ ,” she snarls. “I’d like to see you try fouettes pirouette, or _anything_ I can dance.”

She thinks he might smile, just a quirk of his lips, more expression than she’s ever seen from him, but he turns before she can catch it properly. She kicks at the floor, tugs at her sweat dampened braid, she will be better next time, she will cheat, she will wipe the floor with him.

“Again,” he says quietly and she raises her fists and they start.

They train in a room not unlike where she learned to dance. It is large and empty but there are no mirrors, no barre. He brings in weapons sometimes, knives with rubber blades, batons and staffs, and then knives with steel blades. She picks everything up like she was born to it and the bruises he gives her, the cuts, the burns, fade quickly, are forgotten in days. When she first learned pointe her bleeding feet had been like that too, quick to heal, and the other dancers whispered about how she had _everything_.

She goes to other places too, without the man, with Alexei. Places with old men, cold men, men who teach her other languages and give her a thousand forms of identification with a thousand different names on them. They teach her to drive, they teach her to take a gun apart and put it back together in seconds. When Alexei is there with her he holds her hand.

Mostly she spends her time learning to be strong. When the man who fights her hits her with his left arm, the prosthetic arm, the bruises last much longer. The first time she blacks his eye they drink to it and he calls her by her name and she still calls him nothing.

Sometimes they leave the city, go out into the forest, and that’s when he gives her guns. She can shoot any target she’s given in two months. The guns feel comfortable in her grip, like they know her hands already. The sound of shots crack open the sky and every time she pulls the trigger she thinks it will open up and pour rain and hail and lightning down but if it’s ever raining it’s not because she can shoot a gun like she was born to it. 

Lengths of time go missing, just disappear, she realises sometimes that she can’t remember what she’d done for days before. Alexei tells her not to worry, she is strong. 

Natasha has not touched anyone but the man who teaches her to fight in months. Alexei has been away, somewhere secret and safe, he tells her, but that is all he will say. So she fights the man in gloves closer and closer and it starts to feel like skin to skin even with him covered up throat to ankle. She almost beats him one day, gets him pressed against a wall with her hand at his neck, her thumb at the hollow of his throat. But he’s sweating and he smells like rust, like rain, and she hasn't _tasted_ anyone in months. She licks her lips and he barely moves but something in his eyes goes dark and hungry and something in his jaw goes tight like he’s gritting his teeth and she leans in closer.

“Do you love this more than dancing?” he asks her then, before she can taste him, and she freezes in place.

“I have never danced,” she says, confused. She stumbles back from him, raises her fists, feels a fight coming even though he isn't moving. Her head hurts, her mouth tastes like metal. 

He takes off his gloves. His left hand is folded hinges of metal, he flexes his fingers, drops his gloves on the ground. _The Winter Soldier_ , she thinks. She has met him before. She had been younger, stood at the foot of her bed, a long room with short beds, and he he had been talking to their trainer and the girls had all whispered about him, _he’s the fist of the KGB_ , and privately Natalia had decided she would be the blade, the bullet, the blood. But she had danced too, she thinks, like every little girl dreams of (and her mouth tastes like metal and her head throbs). 

He is rolling up his sleeves and his gloves are on the floor and he _smiles_ at her, a dead-eyed grin, and she is so disarmed that she almost falters (but she doesn't, she would never). She raises her fists. 

They fight again and it’s like breathing cold air, sharp all the way down to her lungs. She feels like she has learnt a million things in a moment (she is the blade, the bullet, the blood), and she could kill him with the tips of her fingers. But he gets her caught, tugs her close, and she wants to laugh when his arm comes around across her neck. His metal arm, cold and deadly. His hair falls across her face as he leans over her, his lips brush her cheekbone.

“I’m married,” she says (and she loves him and he is perfect), and he steps back and they fight again.

Just a few days later he comes to her house. 

“Your...Alexei has been killed,” he tells her, looking furious that the words should come from his lips. Natasha blinks, and then blinks again, and there are waves in her head and the echo gunshots make when they’re amongst trees and snow, and her knees buckle (she is under a spotlight dancing and her strength fails) and she’s down. He catches her. He holds her while she cries. Like she is a lump of meat, a package tied with string, some inanimate thing rather than a living, breathing (weeping, shaking) woman. Rather than the woman he has touched and fought. 

“Natalia,” he says and she twists her head so she can press her lips to the metal hand because it’s not real, it’s not him, it _doesn't_ count and her husband is dead and she kisses his cold hand and he lets her. 

She had loved Alexei (she loves him and he is perfect) and she cries, held up by this other man’s hands, her lips pressed to his palm, her tears pooling there like melted snow. Hysterically she thinks he might rust and it is this that makes her able to stand and to scrub the tears from her face.

“He was serving his country,” says the Winter Soldier. “We have a mission.”


	3. Two

The Black Widow dances Myrtha in _Giselle_. She is a spirit queen of vengeance, she kills men, she dances and they dance and their feet bleed. She drowns them. She poisons them. She strangles the life out of them. 

In the Red Room they inject her with something that makes her veins scream and her head throb and her mouth taste like metal but she’s been having these treatments for as long as she remembers and they make her _good_. It’s liquid courage, liquid luck, liquid fire. She’s tough without it, she’s strong and dangerous and vicious, she was a little girl lined up with other little girls and she learned to kill before they ever gave her drugs, but with it she feels invincible. The little girl that could rip your arm off with her pinky finger if she wanted to, but she doesn't, because it’s messy and she is neat and clean and she _does her job_. 

She plays the seductress first, she wears veils over her face and dresses that hit all the right places and seams down the back of her stockings. She plays it well, she strings men along like the pied piper and the look of surprise on their faces right before she kills them, like how could this slip of a thing, this girl with a ballerina’s grace and poise and _femininity_ , five feet two in stocking feet, like how could she be the one to end them, it tastes like strawberries and cream to her. Seduction is easy. Seduction is something she learns without the help of the Winter Soldier. 

There are traitors everywhere, she is told, and she kills them, whole families of them. She doesn't question it but she weeps about it at home in her dark apartment (she had a husband once and he was warm and sweet but he is gone). She numbs to it quickly (she was born numb, she was never warm and sweet). Almost every day she cleans dark rust blood from under her fingernails.

Killing wicked men is strawberries and cream but sometimes, when she hasn't killed in a long time, when she hasn't been in the room for longer, she wonders that it’s not a part of it. Some euphoric response built in, triggered by blood and stopped breath. But then she goes back and they tell her there are more traitors and she _seethes_ with anger at what they would do to her country and she kills and it tastes like strawberries and cream. 

The Winter Soldier continues to train her and she thinks that he knows something of how she feels. She is cold, but she will never be as cold as he is. She will be better than him though, she decides. They can fight for hours now without stopping and she matches him blow for blow. There is almost never a winner. Sometimes he smiles. Sometimes she thinks about the taste of metal when she kissed his hand and she licks her lips to taste it again.

He comes to her house one day, an action that’s strange in itself, they always meet where they train. He comes to her house and she freezes in her doorway because last time he had told her that Alexei was dead (she has no one to lose anymore but that doesn't mean he won’t take something else from her). 

“Would you...may I sleep here?” he asks her.

She blinks at him because she is still frozen and his words don’t really mean anything immediately. He lowers his eyes, shakes his head (a thoroughly alien gesture on him) and turns to leave but her head clears and she calls him back and when he turns to look at her he is a dog kicked and still wanting for affection, scared and hopeful, and it’s somehow terrifying and she steps aside and lets him in. 

He doesn't say a lot, he mumbles his thanks and holds his metal arm stiffly at his side. His right hand trembles slightly and she pretends not to notice. He is the _fist_ of the KGB. He looks like he hasn't slept in years.

“Are you alright?” 

He doesn't answer, just sits on her couch, his fists on his knees. She makes him tea which he drinks slowly, carefully, in total silence. She doesn't think she’s ever seen him eat or drink before. He doesn't when they fight. Neither does she. He looks like a real person. 

“I can get you blankets,” she says, the words coming out in a rush. He pushes his mug across the small table. He frowns at it like he’s confused, like whatever is happening to him _shouldn't_ be. He moves like he’s pushing his limbs through sand or water. 

“Can I stay with you?” he asks, not meeting her eyes. “I’m cold and I - “

“Yes,” says Natalia.

She sleeps in worn flannel, changes quickly while he stays in her living room, unmoving but for the tremors in his hand. Her hands are shaking too, and her fingers slip on the buttons of her shirt. Her bed has been empty for more than a year. She has been the seductress and sometimes she killed them in beds, stained sheets with blood, rippled blankets with the jerking, dying kicks they made before their breath stopped, but her home is something outside of that and her bed has not been a warm place for a long time. She swipes a hand across the top cover, smooths out the surface, plucks at invisible dirt on the pillow he will use. _I’m cold_ , he’d said, and he was, but so was she. 

He comes into her bedroom, stands at the foot of her bed. He looks down at himself, his hands spread wide, faint confusion still scratched out in between his eyes.

“I have nothing to wear,” he says quietly and, not for the first time, Natalia wonders where he lives. Maybe he sprung from a box fully formed, maybe he doesn't exist when she can’t see him, maybe he lives in the Red Room.

“Wear as much or as little as you like,” she says shortly. “Take off your boots.” 

He does as he’s asked. She turns away when he begins to unbutton his shirt but he’s wearing something long-sleeved and woolen underneath, and under his trousers too, he’s as covered as he always is. Alexei slept in something similar, she realises, and she clenches her jaw and looks away from him again. 

They don’t say anything else. Natalia climbs into bed, her side, the small sliver of sheets and mattress and blankets that she’s carved out for herself. She used to drape herself across Alexei, he was warm and solid and he let her tuck her hands against his side or stretch her arm across his chest, her legs over his hips, but he was gone and it was too cold to do anything now but curl up as small as she can. 

With the Winter Soldier next to her she doesn't know what to do. She lies stiff and straight as a board and he does too. His arm brushes hers occasionally, the flesh one, and it’s warm but she flinches every time. It takes what feels like hours but slowly, she sinks into something more relaxed, she turns on her side, faces him, she closes her eyes. He doesn't move and she can’t imagine touching him but he’s so close and his breathing is soft and even and the rhythm relaxes her. 

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he tells her after awhile, his voice quiet and scared. 

“It’s fine,” she soothes. “I don’t mind.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he sighs, like he’s letting the world fall from his shoulders, and he turns to face her and she lets him curl his warm hand in hers before he closes his eyes and falls asleep. He is gone when she wakes up. 

Afterward, it stops being such a surprise to see him at her home. Things become easier with him, less stilted, less cold. Sometimes she wonders if anyone knows he visits her outside of their training, she knows they do not like it when their people are friends. People in their profession _aren't_ friends. They drift around one another and they work missions together sometimes but nothing ever sticks, not really, you can’t be friends with ghosts. But somehow, with the Winter Soldier who has no name and no history, it works. They talk. They kill people and they talk. She trusts him with everything and they talk. 

The first time he kisses her it isn't real. They are pretending to be married and his lips brush hers almost like an afterthought, and his skin is dry and he smells like winter. She kisses him next, and it is real, they are still pretending to be married but it _is_ real. She backs him into a corner and opens his mouth with her tongue, with her teeth, and his fingers trip up her spine and dig into her hips and he kisses her back and it feels like some sort of victory.

They aren't often together. They steal time and they steal touches. She misses his skin and his flesh and even the particular cold of his metal arm, the way it prickles at her, just how uncomfortable it is. She likes to be uncomfortable with him, even though she would trust him with her life, she thinks it is safer to be uncomfortable with him. She knows less about him than he does. She wants to know everything about him.

When he is sleeping she tells him her secrets. It’s dangerous, even with him deep asleep, but she does it anyway.

“I don’t think this is _right_.”

She drifts through decades and he disappears for years at a time and so does she and neither of them age very much. Her will falters like his does not. Like his _can’t_. Once or twice she is present when he splinters a little bit. When something cuts loose and he starts to yell in English or cry and she doesn't even try to understand it, just strokes her hand evenly down his back and hopes he won’t attack her. He only does that once and the fingertip bruises at her neck last for days and she strikes a blow to his temple with the hilt of her knife that lays him out cold. 

Most of the time he is fine and they talk. They kiss. They fuck. He tells her she was the first of her kind but will not be the last. They are sweat slicked from the fight and this makes her pause. She slides down the wall to sit cross-legged on the floor and he follows her. The first of her kind. She tiptoes her fingers down her thigh, watches the shadows, thin and jagged, the limbs of a dancer laced into knife blade pointe shoes. The light of the spotlight had been bright and voices in her head told her she was perfect. 

“Was I ever a ballerina?” she asks him, twisting her fingers into clumsy pirouettes.

“No,” he says after a pause. “They thought that making you into a fairy tale would keep you loyal. They cut it out because you kept breaking through, it was tiring you out. They needed you whole for other things.” 

“I remember fainting, and you were there.”

“You were coming out of the Red Room, you fainted, I caught you.” 

“Did you ever attack me in an alley?” she asks then. The silence stretches.

“Yes, but I didn’t know,” he says finally. “They told me afterwards, they wanted an American for you to hate.” 

“You’re not American.”

“No, and they abandoned that plan too,” his voice is a whisper. “But they used me for it all the same.” 

“Why don’t you leave?” she asks him, barely audible. He closes his eyes.

“Impossible,” he says and he leaves her instead. 

When she sees him next he doesn't seem to remember their conversation but it sparks something in her that she’s been keeping at arms reach for a long time. The idea that she could _leave_. They have given her every skill she needs to do it and almost no reason to stay. They've given her so many skills and made her use them for things she feels she can finally admit she doesn't understand. And there were other girls too, she remembers, girls in rows, girls en pointe, girls who probably have a body count. _The first of her kind, but not the last_. Girls who had no choice.

She tells him this, insists that he remembers the conversation they had but of course he doesn't. He tries to kill her, rams a knife toward her neck that she ducks with a breath of space to spare. She doesn't try to fight him, he is fresh from the Red Room and he won’t stop, he won’t remember the way her body feels under his hands, the ways they touch without violence, and it breaks her heart. She disappears instead, she is faster than him, smaller too, she is better at slipping through cracks that no one thinks to check.

For a few years she drifts around Russia, killing people she thinks deserve it. Occasionally it’s people who have hurt her, people who worked in the Red Room, but she is smart enough not to bury herself too deep in revenge. She doesn't like killing people but she doesn't think she has many other marketable skills. For awhile she teaches English. She thinks about auditioning for a ballet company but she knows she would be found too easily (her head throbs, her mouth tastes of metal). She tries to stand on her toes and wobbles and falls. She goes back to killing because it’s all she really knows and it pays well and they call her the Black Widow.


	4. Three

Natasha Romanoff dances Odette and Odile. She pure and she is wicked, black and white, ballet has never been bloodless and a swan is a vicious bird. Clint Barton is sent to kill her and he doesn't. She is disenchanted already and then he _doesn't_ kill her. She has been on a mission and hasn't eaten in days and he chases her across rooftops with a strung bow. She kicks his feet out from under him and he doesn't fall he just kicks her back, in the ribs, and she tries to stab him through the eye and he breaks one of her fingers and it goes like this until they're both panting and staring at each other and feeling out their wounds. He looks at her like a puzzle he has to figure out and it infuriates her and she lunges at him before she’s really ready and he shoots an arrow through her calf and knocks her out with a blow to the head.

Somehow she wakes up. Handcuffed and bandaged but healing quickly and alive.

“You should have killed me,” she tells him and he laughs. 

“You’re much too interesting,” he tells her and she laughs.

He asks her to join SHIELD and she knows who they are of course and she knows that it would effectively sever any sort of ties she has with Russia. She hesitates for only a moment, thinks of the Winter Soldier who had disappeared when she had disappeared, thinks about how it had hurt her then and how she wouldn't let it hurt her now, thinks that she’ll go to America and disappear there too, show SHIELD just how interesting she really is, and she accepts.

It’s Clint Barton who convinces her to stay. He reminds her of herself maybe, or he reminds her of someone she could be. Dark still, sketched out in grey still, but able to help people who need it. Maybe. He has a wicked tongue on him and he actually makes her laugh and all she really wants is a place where she doesn't feel trapped and he tells her that SHIELD is it. He is wrong, of course, but it’s as close as she thinks she can get. 

She thinks of the Winter Soldier of course, and then she desperately _doesn't_ think of him. He is smoke and he is wind. He shoots her one day, when she is on a mission and shocked so badly by him just _being_ there that she stumbles some and he pushes her off a cliff and shoots her through the torso and leaves. In hospital she wonders that maybe he knew her, maybe he noticed, maybe he shot her through the side because he knew it wouldn't kill her. But it had killed his mark, the man hanging underneath her, his head at the small of her back, his head gone in a wet, red mist that left her feeling sticky for days. He had done his job, he had taken his man, he had ignored her because she wasn't _anything_ to him. 

She takes her first holiday after that. An island. Beaches and sand and heat, nothing like anything she is used to. She doesn't tell anyone but Fury who looks at her for a long time but doesn't say anything. She thinks he might be close to trusting her. She would like his trust. She doesn't tell Clint and she knows he won’t look for her. She starts having nightmares she hasn't had in years and she takes sleeping pills to dull them and when she goes back Clint does notice that because sometimes they share a bed (for sex, but also for comfort, for familiarity, for friendship).

“Want to talk about it?” he asks her, so kind and concerned, and she smiles at him, holds his face in her hands.

“No,” she says, and he accepts it without comment.

On a plane, on her way back from a mission, years later, everything cracks through again. She is leaning back in her chair, she has washed the blood from her hands, she is looking out the window at men in yellow vests with red cones. She is trying to spot her suitcase on the baggage carrier. And then a man sits down next to her and everything changes. She knows who he is in an instant and the scream creeps up her throat, scrapes it raw like dry branches, and her jaw aches with the force of her teeth pressed together to hold it back. She almost gets to her feet and walks straight off the plane. But she doesn't. She relaxes her jaw and lets her held breath out as slowly and casually as she can, then she looks out the window, down to the tarmac and the flashing lights of forklifts and trailers, of luggage and slick painted lines. She looks away from the Winter Soldier. She pretends she does not know him because she _doesn't_.

Of course, it seems impossible that he would be there and she would be there and they would be seated next to each other. Impossible like it’s planned, like her death is in his eyes and in his hands. Whispered into his frozen brain. He does not know her, she decides as she buckles her seatbelt. He doesn't know about her scars, the ones he put there. Like the bullet that went through her side and like the taste of him, the cold metal of his hand at the curve of her hip. Lines of fire he burnt into her when she was not called Natasha. 

He is wearing gloves, she notices, he looks a hundred years old, she notices. He needs a haircut. She folds her hands in her lap and looks back out the window. The painted lines disappear behind them as the plane starts to move. She has been on planes with him before, smaller planes, and older, and he’d held her hand the first time. One palm is folded over her fingers and on this flight she holds her own hands until her knuckles whiten with the effort. 

She closes her eyes at the point before the plane has left the ground, where it’s going faster than you think is possible, and she bares her teeth at the speed, a gleeful smile, because she always does. She likes the feeling, like she’s half a step away from blinking into another world, and she knows he won’t make a move yet, she’s safe to smile. And she wishes she could take that last step and everything would disappear. 

When she opens her eyes he is looking at her and she smiles briefly, like you might do in real life, to a stranger on a plane, pleasant and indifferent, and he blinks, frowns a little, looks away. It makes her nervous, that frown, but there’s some part of her too that wants to push it, wants to tell him who she is and watch the frown turn into death and his gloved hands turn into weapons. Part of her wants to see his face open in recognition, his lips parted and his eyes wide, and they’ll run away together when they land. But she keeps her smile bland and he looks away.

The seatbelt light blinks off and she stays put. He will not make a move now, not in the air, not with everyone settling in. It would be messy and it would be dangerous. He will kill her when the plane has landed, with everyone milling about and shuffling together and tugging at bags and wanting to be gone so badly they don’t notice the woman slumped in her seat, chin to chest, wrists limp and red-yarn hair disheveled. She thinks he will do it with poison or with a light touch. If he touches her without gloves she thinks she won’t be able to put up a fight. 

She stays put too because really she doesn't want him to know that _she_ knows what’s happening. He would not care about messy if he thought she would put up a fight. She wonders what they've told him about her, what memories they've spun out of thin air and whispered with a hypodermic needle. Probably not memories, probably just statistics. She is a SHIELD agent, American, she is an enemy. Maybe the person who sent him on this death trip doesn't even know who she is. It’s been a long time. 

She waves a flight attendant over and she can feel the way his body tenses when the woman reaches them with smiles and powder clean hands.

“Can I get...vodka?” she asks and the woman nods and disappears.

Natasha feels reckless, they’re in the air, another world, and she smiles again at the Winter Soldier, sheepishly.

“Bad flyer,” she explains. He doesn't say anything but his lips twitch, almost a smile, and he shifts in his chair. Not a robot, a real live person with the brains of a robot.

The alcohol doesn't settle her, it shivers against her lips and through her veins reminding her that she hasn't eaten all day. It brings bubbles to the surface, feelings of terror and abandon and he won’t hurt her on the plane and she smiles at him, the brightest and sweetest and nicest smile she can muster.

“I know who you are,” she says and he doesn't smile, he just shuts his eyes and turns away.

She moves and he doesn't. She shuffles passed him, facing away, and her shoes knock against his boots and she thinks she would not feel any different if the window cracked and the atmosphere rushed in. She can feel his eyes on her as she moves toward the bathroom. Pinpricks of ice shiver up her skin. 

Her destination is the airplane bathroom and she locks the door behind her and holds her breath until she hears a scrape of plastic and watches the lever turn and then he’s in with her, as she knew he would be, and the door is shut behind him in all the time it takes for her to inhale. His hand covers her mouth then and she bites down on the pad of his palm, bites around a choke, a sob, a scream, brings her knee up to his groin, twists and pushes him back with a shoulder. He is impassive, he takes her blows as silently as she gives them and then he pushes forward. His palm hits her mouth again and his cold arm is pressed across her chest, above her breasts, pinning her to the wall. She bites him again and he just pushes harder and the taste of his blood mingles with the vodka still on her tongue and she wants to throw up. 

“You know why I’m here?” he rasps in English and she nods. “You want to get the rest of this plane killed too?” He takes his bloodied hand away from her mouth.

“No,” she says dully. 

“Then be careful,” he says, his voice stumbling down steps, mumbled and thick. She looks at him.

“You know me,” she tells him, and her voice trips up, a squeak of hope. “We fought together we...you loved me, I think.”

He steps back from her, his metal arm falls and she can breathe easy. His hands clench tight and then he spreads his fingers wide, an unconscious act, a nervous act that doesn't fit in with the rest of him, his robot brain. He looks at her then, his eyes drift over her face, narrow at her hair, he blinks rapidly and then he shakes his head.

“No,” he says slowly. “I didn't.” 

He leaves the bathroom without looking at her and she slumps onto the toilet, breathing heavily. 

When she goes back to her seat he doesn't speak to her, doesn't even meet her eye. So she stares out of the window, looks at the clouds below them, blue and grey, thinks of the bruises that will mottle her chest and then fade away. She will get out of this. She will kill him, this person who isn't the man who slept in her bed, traced kisses down the notches of her spine, the fine bones in her wrist. She will kill him and she won’t regret it. 

There are a thousand other ways she could get away from him, of course, numbers she could dial on the airplane phones that would send alerts to SHIELD and armies of men in trucks with expensive technology waiting for her. Or even planes, an alert to the pilot to set the plane down or to board it somehow. Tony could do it. But she doesn't. She wants to beat this on her own, some remnant of her life in Russia that needs crushing out. She had not said goodbye to him and this is closer to the sort of goodbye she is used to. Death can be closure, she decides, and she orders another drink, downs it in one, watches the clouds drift by below them.

“You taught me to shoot in the snow,” she says when the sky gets too much. “We took turns picking leaves to shoot from trees. It didn't really work, of course, the bullets destroyed the leaves, but we picked anyway.”

His jaw clenches, he closes his eyes and Natasha inhales, a shuddering breath, and keeps going.

“I never used your name because you never gave me one to use. They called you the Winter Soldier and that fit well enough except when you came to my home. Under my sheets you weren't cold. You called me Natalia and I don’t let anyone else call me that anymore. You used to hold my hand when we were in planes and we’d hide it under a blanket because we were only supposed to be colleagues, barely even civil with one another. We had a few missions together, once we posed as husband and wife and we went out dancing every night. You told me you’d like to own a dog. You told me you were scared.”

The Winter Soldier’s hands are gripping the arms of his seat so hard that plastic of the left one is cracking. His eyes are no longer closed, they are moving rapidly, everywhere but her, like he’s avoiding the words that are spilling from her mouth.

“When was the last time you were in the Red Room?”

“It’s not called that,” he chokes out, his voice like a drowning man taking a breath. “You’re a liar.” 

“It’s been awhile hasn't it,” she says quietly. “You’re stretched too far. This used to happen to you before. You’d break and disappear, I saw it. You’re not...you wanted to leave before I did.” 

He closes his eyes again and his hands relax slightly and Natasha thinks that this will be her last few hours alive. She closes her eyes too, just briefly, then starts to speak again. She whispers stories to him. She tells him about the time she’d thrown a snowball at him and he’d looked so furious with ice in his hair that she hadn't been able to stop laughing long enough to fight him off when he dropped slush down the back of her shirt. She tells him about her apartment and the places where they’d slept, tangled together on her couch or in her bed or on the floor when they were too exhausted to get any further. They had fought often and she tells him about that too, the countless time she’d stuttered over a name that she didn't have and he’d shut down completely. Or when he’d been in a good mood or they were on a mission and he’d told her to pick a name and she’d laughed. Or the time when he’d told her he thought his name was James and sworn her to secrecy. 

She tells him stories and she thinks about escaping. She has weapons on her, she has ways of getting through airport security without them noticing (she has her limbs too and they are weapons enough but she has steel and sparks too). But she always stops at the point where she gets away from him and he destroys a plane and kills everyone on board. So she tells him about their life together (their lives together, a thousand memories inside memories) and she decides that she is definitely about to die.

But something switches off in him (or on in him, she can never tell) and his hands start shaking like they had when he’d shown up at her doorstep and asked for a place to sleep. His hands start shaking and the plane descends and she reaches over and buckles his seatbelt for him. He doesn't move otherwise and he doesn't open his eyes, he just sits there trembling while the plane hits tarmac and Natasha thinks she should definitely be leaving, that if she wants to live she should be darting passed him, leaving behind her bag (her favourite shoes, her favourite gloves, her favourite stilleto blade) and slipping between people like smoke. But she doesn't. She sits with him until everyone has left the plane and the flight attendant is watching them nervously and then she realises what he’s trying so hard to do and she leaves him behind like his shaking hands are asking her to. 

She doesn't start crying until she’s in a taxi and far enough away that she feels safe (she will never feel safe). By the time she gets to Fury her tears have dried and she knows there’s nothing there to tell him they’d ever been there. She wonders if she’s been followed, she expects it but she still wonders. If he wanted her dead she would be dead. His hands had been shaking, he had _let her go_.

“Don’t tell anyone about this,” Fury tells her and she nods. “I don’t want to spook ‘em,” he clarifies.

“No,” she says quietly. “He didn't seem that interested in chasing me. It was...different than what I've seen him do before. If he wanted me dead I would be dead.” 

“Do you think that was his choice or theirs? Did it feel like something bigger?” 

“I don’t know, maybe. I was...out of sorts,” she manages. “Nothing he does is really his choice.” 

Fury nods and she leaves without another word. 

Natasha drifts back into reality slowly. She spends more time in the shooting range than she usually would. She could hit a target dead center with her eyes closed and her fingers broken but she wants to make sure. She keeps expecting to find something among her belongings like a get out of jail free card, something that would explain why she’s still alive. He shot _through_ her to get his mark last time she encountered him. The Winter Soldier never used to do recon. It can’t have just been her whispered stories. It’s been too long, he’s breaking for good. 

Steve invites her to the opening of his museum exhibit and she doesn't wear red or black because she’s not always the spider and redheads look good in green. She hasn't killed anyone in a long time, she _feels_ green. When she sees the Winter Soldier painted up high with the other Howling Commandos she drops her glass of champagne and Clint whisks her away with fierce looks at anyone who tries to stop them and he hustles her into a bathroom, swears viciously at the only other occupant who hurries away quickly, and bars the door with a short, savage baton he has in the inside pocket of his tuxedo. He doesn't touch her. He knows not to. She rubs a hand across her eyes and it comes away black with makeup and tears. She hadn't even noticed she was crying. 

“Steve’s friend...James....he was my soldier,” she whispers. “The Winter Soldier who I worked with, who shot me that time in....who.......I _must_ have known this. He told me his name was James once. I can’t tell Steve.” 

“No,” Clint agrees and they leave it at that. 

Clint gets her back to her apartment and then leaves because she asks him to. She takes off her shoes and she points her toes. She is stocking feet and shaking hands and she knows she’s not a dancer, her feet aren't scarred right and her body doesn't move right. But the Winter Soldier wasn't an American prisoner of war either. She turns her feet out. She stands in a doorframe and she lifts her leg, bent at the knee, holds her toes and tries to stretch up higher and of course it doesn't work, of course it hurts, because she _isn't_ a dancer. She kills people and she saves them and she is not a dancer and the Winter Soldier is _not_ an American prisoner of war.


	5. Epilogue

“No,” Natasha says and she tosses his knife to the floor. “I won’t kill you....James.” 

He flinches at his name, his flesh hand clenches and unclenches. She should never have come here, she should have gone on holiday like she planned, she will go on holiday. After she walks out of here she could be on a plane in two hours, off to sand and sunshine and double shot cocktails. After she _walks out of here_. He is looking at her with narrowed eyes and neither of them are armed but it’s never mattered before. He could kill her with a snap of his fingers and she could kill him with a twist of her hips. 

“I won’t.” she says again. She’s seen him alive and she thinks that was all she wanted, that tiny sliver of hope that maybe, maybe he would be in a safe-house she remembered and maybe, _maybe_ he wouldn't kill her on sight. And now she’s seen him and those things have happened and she won’t kill him and he won’t kill her and she will drink her cocktails and she will have her sunshine and she will _not think_. 

“Leave. Find someone else to kill you,” she tells him tiredly. “You can’t possibly think it will mean something to have me do it.” 

He still doesn't move. He stares at her and his eyes are open wounds and she wonders if he knows how he looks. He can’t possibly remember much of her, maybe just the feel of her skin and the colour of her hair and whatever Hydra had told him after she’d gone. Maybe all he remembers is the force of her fists. She wonders what he remembers of Steve and what had shaken it all loose. 

"I remember you dancing,” he says quietly. “You wore a crown and a veil and you killed men.” 

“I...we only dreamed I was a dancer,” she says. “I did kill men.” 

“Then kill _me_ ,” he insists, taking a step forward, wobbling slightly on the mattress (that they’re still stood, facing one another, on a double bed in a dingy apartment is absurd and terrible). 

“No,” Natasha says. She steps lightly off the bed, back onto the floor, and his eyes follow her as she crosses the room. She ignores his knife, still on the floor, and she ignores her gun, hot against her thigh. “Find someone else to do it because I won’t. I’m going to the beach.” He still watches her and she knows she was always going to look for him first. Before the sun and sand. Because she was her and because he was him (nameless, faceless, robot, human _him_ ). And she’s seen him now and he’s alive and he will stay alive and she will go swimming. 

“The beach,” he says, like she’s the stupidest girl in the world and she thinks she ought to punch him for that maybe, or smile at him, roll her eyes, take the joke. 

“Maybe you ought to take a vacation too,” she says instead and she actually does manage a smile and he looks at her like she’s gone mad. Her smile doesn’t even fall flat, she deserves an Oscar . “The Smithsonian museum is nice,” she says. 

He doesn’t reply. He leaves instead. He brushes past her and even through blood and cloth the touch makes her close her eyes. He leaves and she closes her eyes and she stays there until she thinks it’s safe to breath again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I love you all :)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and thank you to satavaisa@lj for the best art ever!


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